A Room of Her Own

Works by Chaminade, Smyth, Tailleferre, L Boulanger

Neave Trio

Chandos CHAN 20238 83:10 mins

My colleague Natasha Loges, reviewing the Neave Trio’s earlier disc Her Voice in 2019, praised their ‘generous and warmhearted, utterly beguiling playing’.

Quite simply, over A Room of Her Own, I concur. For a start, the four works by Chaminade, Tailleferre, Smyth and Lili Boulanger are well chosen, both for themselves and for the way they work with and against each other.

Tailleferre’s Piano Trio is the only one finished in old age, the composer reworking the initial 1917 score some 60 years later. It shows her at her best, judging dissonances with care so they sound unforced, and covering a wide range of moods from the lyrical to the jokey and even rude. The other four trios all belong to their composers’ early twenties, and are quite astonishingly mature in technique. Lili Boulanger’s D’un matin de printemps and D’un soir triste are probably the best known. They are nearly the last music she wrote before illness, possibly Crohn’s Disease, took her life at only 24 and, as Frankie Perry’s excellent notes suggest, the second of these may well have mirrored her impending mortality.

These two trios both date from 1917, the other two from 1880. Chaminade’s First Trio shows her in a more serious light than her later music does, with plenty of variety, just a few forwardlooking whole-tone passages, as well as the occasional canon and, in the Presto leggiero, some hairraising challenges for the piano, brilliantly despatched. Finally,

Ethel Smyth’s Trio adds its voice to the recent success of her opera The Wreckers, its Brahmsian harmonies displayed with passion and aplomb. Throughout, the string tone is the most beautiful I’ve heard in a long time. Roger Nichols

PERFORMANCE

RECORDING